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After struggling with my Windows 7 grinding to a halt over the last few months, I finally managed to get it up to speed again. Although some of the suggestions below may seem obvious, I've selected them from a longer list as my recommendations for the four best ways to speed up your Windows 7 installation.<\/p>\n
Number Four<\/strong><\/p>\n Disable the taskbar "jump lists"<\/a> to see a small improvement in the responsiveness of the taskbar in general. I never open "recent items" from a jumplist, mainly because I keep my favourite applications (mIRC<\/a>, Thunderbird<\/a>, my media player, Notepad++<\/a> and Firefox<\/a>) open at all times anyway. <\/p>\n Number Three<\/strong><\/p>\n Disable Explorer's "libraries"<\/a> to speed up Explorer loads. Even if you use a shell replacement (like the fantastic Directory Opus<\/a>), you're still using Explorer for things like "Save As…" dialogs.<\/p>\n Number Two<\/strong><\/p>\n Disable Explorer's "homegroup"<\/a> to yield the biggest speed benefits in launching Explorer instances. I don't need to interface with two system services to choose where to save a photo from imgur.com<\/a>, thank you.<\/p>\n Number One<\/strong><\/p>\n Delete everything in C:\\Users*\\AppData\\Local\\Temp that's older than two days and not currently in use. I don't know whether my hard drive is particularly badly fragmented but I noticed an immediate and significant improvement in general responsiveness.<\/p>\n Bootnote<\/strong><\/p>\n Let me know if any of these help you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week I explore how, after struggling with my Windows 7 grinding to a halt over the last few months, I finally managed to get it up to speed again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[12,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/windows_media_player_jumplist.png\" "\\"windows_media_player_jumplist\\"")
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